In this delightful and magical novel by Pete Hamill, eleven-year-old Michael Devlin, a young altarboy, meets Rabbi Judah Hirsch, an Orthodox rabbi who has called out to Michael as he is passing the synagogue during a terrible snowstorm in 1947. The rabbi urgently needs someone to turn on the lights for him, but it is the Sabbath, a day of rest and contemplation, and turning on the lights is considered "work." The two strike up an unusual friendship, as each learns from the other, with Michael teaching the rabbi English, and the rabbi teaching Michael Yiddish. Michael is hoping to read the "magic" books the rabbi has in his library, books about Prague, the Kabbalah, the Golem, miracles, and the secret name of God.
Michael and his widowed mother live in a section of Brooklyn where the majority population is Irish, but it includes gangs of young toughs who prey on other immigrants, especially the Jews. During British rule in Ireland, the Irish developed a code of silence, and they have brought this code and their fear of the authorities with them to Brooklyn. When Michael observes the savage beating of a Jewish storekeeper, the gang threatens Michael if he talks. Though he knows this violence is wrong--and against everything he has learned in church--he obeys the code.
The novel is a morality tale, with a good deal of teaching done by the rabbi--about the past history of the Jews, about Judaism itself, and about the mysticism of the Kabbalah--illustrating the misunderstandings of Michael and his friends about a religion which is alien to them, but Hamill goes to considerable lengths to keep the novel from being preachy. Since Michael is only eleven, he carefully limits the point of view to what an eleven-year-old would think and feel. One of the major connections Michael makes with the rabbi is through baseball, which he explains to the rabbi, and as they commiserate about the hitting slump of Jackie Robinson, newly signed by the Dodgers, Michael identifies with Robinson--someone who has had to ignore hatred and survive taunts.
When the hatred and ignorance shown by the thugs in the neighborhood affect Michael, his mother, and the rabbi even more personally, the story reaches a crisis. Here Hamill abandons the vigorous realism he has shown so far and connects the plot with the mysticism of the Kabbalah and the legend of the Golem of Prague. Warm and affecting, without being maudlin, the novel is a personal story, filled with the color and life of the postwar Brooklyn in which Hamill grew up, at the same time that it is realistic about its prejudices and limitations. n Mary Whipple
